November 24, 1971: The D.B. Cooper Hijacking

November 24, 1971, 50 years ago: The legend of D.B. Cooper begins. Like Jack the Ripper, he was a mysterious figure who committed a shocking crime -- although, in his case, he didn't kill anybody -- and was never caught, and may not even have come up with the name by which he became known on his own.

It was the day before Thanksgiving, traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. At Portland International Airport in Oregon, a flight counter attendant for Northwest Orient Airlines reported that a man identifying himself as "Dan Cooper" walked up and used cash to buy a one-way ticket on Flight 305 to Seattle, a flight intended as being only 30 minutes. "Mr. Cooper" boarded the plane, which was a Boeing 727-100, took his seat, and ordered a bourbon and soda.

The flight attendant backed up the counter attendant's description of Mr. Cooper: Wearing a business suit with a black tie and a white shirt, appearing to be in his mid-40s, and looking like the composite sketch above.

The plane took off at 2:50 PM Pacific Standard Time, on time. Shortly thereafter, Cooper handed a note to the flight attendant, Florence Schaffner. Flight attendants -- they were usually still called "stewardesses" at this point, or "stews" for short -- often got handed notes, usually from men who were lonely from their travels. This one dropped it in her purse without reading it. Cooper spoke up: "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb."

She read it. It asked her to sit next to him. She asked to see the bomb. He opened his briefcase, and convinced her that what was inside really was a bomb. The he gave her his demands: $200,000 (about $1.36 million in today's money), 4 parachutes, and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle, to refuel the plane after it landed.

Schaffner went to the cockpit, and told the pilots. When she got back, Cooper was wearing sunglasses. The flight's captain, William A. Scott, contacted Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (a.k.a. "Sea-Tac"). The authorities there contacted local and federal authorities. The other 35 passengers were told only that their arrival would be delayed because of "a minor mechanical difficulty."

Donald Nyrop, president of the airline, was reached. He ordered that the ransom be paid, and that all employees should cooperate completely with Cooper. The plane circled Puget Sound for 2 hours, to give the police and the FBI time to get the money and the parachutes.

Flight attendant Tina Mucklow recalled that Cooper appeared familiar with the local terrain; at one point he remarked, "Looks like Tacoma down there," as the aircraft flew above it. He also correctly mentioned that McChord Air Force Base was only a 20-minute drive (at that time) from Sea-Tac. He didn't match the profile of men engaged in air piracy at the time: Enraged, hardened criminals or "Take this plane to Cuba!" political dissidents.

"He wasn't nervous," she told investigators. "He seemed rather nice. He was never cruel or nasty. He was thoughtful and calm all the time." He even ordered a refill of his drink, paid his tab, and offered to request meals for the flight crew during the stop in Seattle. He was very much the stereotype not of the "air pirate," but that of the "gentleman bandit."

His motive? It wasn't clear. Mucklow asked Cooper if he had a grudge with Northwest Airlines. He said, "I don't have a grudge against your airline, Miss. I just have a grudge."

The FBI got 10,000 $20 bills from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, thus making the serial numbers easier to track.

At 5:39 PM, the plane landed at Sea-Tac. A backpack with the money and the parachutes was delivered to Mucklow. Cooper then released the passengers, Schaffner, and another flight attendant, Alice Hancock -- but not Mucklow. He then told the cockpit crew to take off again, toward Mexico City.

At 7:40, the plane took off again. The only people on board were Cooper, Scott, Mucklow, first officer William Rataczak, and flight engineer Harold E. Anderson. Two F-106 fighter jets from McChord and a Lockheed T-33 training jet followed. At 8:00 PM, having been shown how while on the ground, Cooper opened the plane's rear staircase. At 8:13, there was a sudden, unexpected change in altitude. It has been presumed that this was when he jumped. At 10:15, the plane landed at Reno, Nevada, and it was determined that Cooper was no longer on board.

The FBI found fingerprints and Cooper's tie, but the prints were not in their system, and the tie gave them no hints as to his identity. They looked for men in the region with a criminal record, and an Oregon man named D.B. Cooper stood out. The Portland police quickly ruled him out as a suspect, but the wire service picked up the story, and "D.B. Cooper" has been the name attached to the hijacker ever since.

As far as can be determined, Cooper was never seen again. An extensive search was made of Washington State and Oregon. It enabled the FBI to solve one crime: A skeleton was found, but of a teenage girl, determined to be one murdered weeks earlier. In 1980, Brian Ingram, a boy on a camping trip, found some weather-damaged bills with serial numbers matching the ransom money, $5,880 worth. This was near the Columbia River, which separates Washington from Oregon.

This has led to the leading theory: Cooper died in his attempt to escape, either through being unable to open his parachute in time, or landing too hard anyway, on impact with either the ground or a tree, or drowned in the river, possibly before he could get the heavy parachute off of himself.

In 1986, the FBI gave a cash award worth half the money to Ingram, by then in high school; and half to Northwest Orient Airlines' insurer. Like Cooper himself, none of the other money has ever been found.

As with Jack the Ripper, multiple guesses as to the perpetrator's identity have been made. As with the Ripper, most are easily dismissible. One of the more fascinating ones was that Cooper was John List, who had murdered his family in a religious-fanatic rage in Westfield, New Jersey just 15 days before the hijacking, and hadn't been seen since. He did bear a facial resemblance to the sketch, and, at 46, was age-consistent. He was captured in 1989, and confessed to the slayings, but denied any connection to the Cooper case, and maintained that denial until his death in prison in 2008. The FBI have dropped him from their list of suspects.

Also as with the Ripper, the fact that the Cooper case was unsolved has led to an unending public fascination with it. In 1975, James M. Cain, author of the crime novels turned film noirs The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce and Double Indemnity, published the novel Rainbow's End, an imagination of what happened to Cooper after he jumped.

In 1980, J.D. Reed published a novel titled Free Fall. The following year, it was made into a film, The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, starring Treat Williams. (The story takes a lot of liberties, including the fact that Cooper jumped in daylight, when he actually jumped at night.)

In 1991, Scott Adams published an issue of his Dilbert comic strip suggesting that Cooper died due to sabotage: "He learned that you should never get your parachutes from the same people you're robbing."

The TV series In Search of... (in 1979) and Unsolved Mysteries (1988) examined the Cooper case. TV shows suggesting in-universe solutions to the case have included NewsRadio in 1998, Prison Break in 2006, Numbers in 2009, Leverage in 2012, and Loki in 2021 (The Marvel Cinematic Universe makes the suggestion that Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston, was Cooper).

And the series Twin Peaks, set in Washington State, has a lead character, an FBI Agent, named Dale Bartholomew Cooper. (The name is only a tribute: Agent Cooper was too young to have been the hijacker, but he could have been his son, and thus became an FBI agent as an act of rebellion.)